“known universally as Coins [it] is the most detailed record of public spending imaginable. Some 24m individual spending items in a CSV file of 120GB presents a unique picture of how the government does its business.”

Although that’s because it was presented in UTF-16, which would be great if it were encoding Mandarin (in-joke?), but which actually meant that every second byte was blank – so the Guardian’s developers simply did a quick conversion to UTF-8, halving the size at a keystroke.

He notes:

“This is a different kind of database. It shows how the government actually works; the millions of tiny items that make up the billions of public expenditure every year. It could well be the government’s largest database: if you know of anything of equivalent size and complexity let us know – we can’t come up with anything.”

And then he comments:

“It was only 2006 that the Guardian launched the Free Our Data campaign to push for the government to release public data that we’ve paid for but was previously hidden behind paywalls or official secrecy. Now, that battle is won.”

That’s an interesting one. For me, Coins isn’t actually the marker for the point where we can hang up our campaigning clothes. The Ordnance Survey data release was a huge step. But actually, for me the point at which I’ll feel we’ve really reached the parts that we want to reach is when the Environment Agency makes its flood map data available for free commercial re-use. (I haven’t asked Mike Cross. Perhaps he’ll pitch in.)

But what do you think? It’s your campaign too. Is everything that needs to be done, done? Or is there more to be done, and if so, what?

Gordon Brown’s stint as prime minister is over. But we can thank him for one thing he left behind: the commitment by the Treasury to fund free data from the Ordnance Survey (by my understanding, for at least five years – which I think is at least what it will take for really useful commercial applications to emerge from the availability of the data).

That’s a huge step. When Mike Cross and I started the Free Our Data campaign in March 2006, Tony Blair was prime minister. We knew that there was a strong reason for it, but it took time to get traction. Our first meeting with a minister was with Baroness (Cathy) Ashton at the Ministry of Justice; she didn’t seem too interested.

Once Gordon Brown came into office and there was a change at ministerial level, things changed dramatically. We got audiences and found ministers who were largely sympathetic. Brown too understood the idea – which simply took off when he found himself sitting beside Tim Berners-Lee at a dinner and started making conversation.

Brown asked: “What’s the most important technology right now? How should the UK make the best use of the internet?”

To which the invigorated Berners-Lee replied: “Just put all the government’s data on it.”

Drawing inspiration from administrations around the world which have shown that being transparent can transform the effectiveness of government, we will create a powerful new right to government data, enabling the public to request – and receive – government datasets in an open and standardised format. independent estimates suggest this could provide a £6 billion boost to the UK economy. We will open up Whitehall recruitment by publishing central government job vacancies online, saving costs and increasing transparency.

That £6bn number comes, I believe, from the Cambridge study – though that included making OS Mastermap data free. I don’t think that that will be done, given the commitment to extra public spending it would involve in the short term and the long-term payback it would need.

I also think that while it’s nice to publish central government jobs online, there will be problems in how you slice it so that people can find the jobs they want. You might find that it’ll become something that other sites – and of course businesses – will exploit as a raw data feed and sell access to, or improve. (Yes, I know it’s also a scheme which is about chopping the funding of the Guardian’s public-sector jobs supplement off at the knees; there have been elements within the Tory party which have wanted to do this for years.)

In short: the campaign continues, but the Con-Lib coalition has indicated that it has a lot of the right instincts. Once we know which ministers we need to lobby – and once they know what their viewpoints are – we’ll be pushing the campaign again. There’s still so much data in there which needs to be freed.

Verrry interesting post over at the UKMapping blog. We’ll include the full content because it’s short and very relevant.

Great news was received today at UKMap HQ. After much review and testing Land Registry have confirmed [and are happy for us to tell people] that they are happy to accept registrations based on UKMap.

Great news for all those consultants, government types and property professional using UKMap.

Full text below

“Following a review of UKMap, Land Registry is able to confirm that UKMap meets Land Registry’s requirements as a mapping base on which registration applications can be made and is comfortable accepting registration applications based on UKMap. Such registration applications must still follow relevant guidance as set out in Public Guide 40.”

What does this mean? That LR doesn’t necessarily have to rely on Ordnance Survey maps for registrations. That, too, pours sand into any engines that might be getting started looking to fund OS through higher LR transaction fees. Savvy users would just go to UKMap.

This letter first appeared in the Financial Times on Friday July 30 1999. (You can see it at http://twitpic.com/z7y0m – which we can’t embed it for technical reasons.) We’re using it here because it’s rather interesting historically – especially for the signatories, and particularly one of them. You’ll notice, of course, that it didn’t work out like they asked….

Sir
The financial and commercial freedom that plc status will confer on the Post Office may be a welcome contribution to national competitiveness. However, one Post Office asset, namely the Postcode Address File (PAF), a computerised and maintained list of all postal delivery addresses and their postcodes, is too important a part of the national information infrastructure to be handed over without safeguards.

At present the Post Office receives new address information from local authorities, attaches additional information to optimise the address for postal delivery and allocates a postcode. This information is compiled into the PAF, which is copyrighted and published by the Post Office. IT is also made available through a number of Value Added Resellers (VAR). These data are used by thousands of commercial enterprises, large and small, for the maintenance of customer records and for a wide range of marketing and logistical purposes.

As a public corporation the Post Office has handled its monopoly position, as the national compiler of postal addresses, responsible. However, some have questioned the price of the information and the control the Post Office has exercised over its reuse and resale. Once the Post Office is a plc, directors tasked with maximising shareholder value could be tempted to extract further advantage from the PAF by restricting competitors’ access to the data, placing constraints on the operations of VARs, or charging royalty payments for the use of addresses in other contexts.

To ensure that the Post Office cannot succumb to such temptations as a plc, we would propose that the production, maintenance and placement of the PAF in the public domain should become a regulatory requirement for the Post Office in exchange for the privilege of retaining monopoly rights for the delivery of letters. This would ensure that the national address file becomes a public good to be used for the benefit of all, rather than an unregulated private asset.

Introduction
The Free Our Data campaign was co-founded in March 2006 by Charles Arthur and Michael Cross with the aim of persuading government that non-personal datasets created by government-owned agencies and companies and organisations should be made available for free reuse without licence restrictions.

The rationale for this approach is that citizens have already funded the existence and collection of these agencies through taxes paid over past years. (This includes historical data; Ordnance Survey, for example, has been a trading fund for some time but on its incarnation as a trading fund immediately used data previously collected at public expense.) Furthermore, the private and non-profit sector can imagine better ways of using data than government can because they have a direct interest in using it – but price and licensing are significant barriers to the development of those applications.

The campaign is apolitical. It is not aligned, associated with or funded by any political party or outside group; its (very small) costs are paid by the co-founders out of pocket.

We are delighted that government has chosen to accept the rationale behind the campaign’s logic with its plans to create the OS Free products. Our only caution is that it must ensure that the model used to fund it can be widely applied to other non-personal datasets within government. OS Free should not be a one-off, but instead should be the basis for a wider sharing of data.

One final, general point: the Free Our Data campaign believes that Ordnance Survey provides an excellent map-generating service and must remain a government-owned asset whose public task includes the continual mapping of the UK’s geography and built environment. Any moves to privatise any part of its operation would be retrograde and threaten both OS’s future usefulness and the UK’s economy. We would oppose such moves.

Question 1:What are your views or comments on the policy drivers for this consultation?
The need to reduce overt government spending, allied to the growth in personal computing power owned and controlled by the public at large, creates an entirely new opportunity to let citizens analyse, understand and benefit from the data that the government collects on their behalf. This is a two-way process.

Clearly the UK government is rapidly recognising the benefits of transparency – that actions are not just seen to be done, but that the reasoning for the actions can also be interrogated and understood. This is one key policy driver. (Hereafter PD1.)

There is a second policy driver (hereafter PD2): the need to reduce the public sector deficit in coming years. This is best done through a reduction in public spending and an increase in tax revenue from the private sector.

There is also an untapped private-sector entrepreneurial market whose entire existence depends on the successful implementation of this consultation and future ones like it. When government-collected data is treated as a limited asset which must be priced to create an artificial shortage, government constrains the private sector which generated the taxes used by the government to create the data. Clearly, that then constrains the tax base, because not all companies (extant or proposed) can afford to buy the data. Therefore total taxes are lowered by pricing data. This is inefficient, and constrains entrepreneurship based around the effective use of data.

Therefore making government-owned data like this free for reuse (including commercial reuse) will bring in larger tax revenues as long as HMRC is vigilant in collection of owed taxes from individuals and companies.

How the consultation will reduce public sector spending in the context of the Ordnance Survey’s financial model (as a trading fund) is less obvious, but still exists. The consultation iterates costs of making these mapping data free. However, it does not iterate the potential benefits through reduced costs to local councils, police forces and local health authorities, for example, of being able to provide map-linked data on public websites, without paying, at the Landranger and Explorer scale; this has been a consistent bugbear to local councils, to police forces and public health observatories which want to share their work with the public.

Making such data free also obviates the legal examination of any instance in which those bodies wish to share their work – a cost which is also unpriced in the consultation document. While these costs may not match the millions of pounds directly attributable in lost revenue from sales of Explorer and Landranger-scale data, they are significant in the cultural sense too – because they enable those bodies to operate in a more transparent manner as well, satisfying PD1 above.

Question 2: What are your views on how the market for geographic information has evolved recently and is likely to develop over the next 5-10 years?
The geographic information market has been completely transformed in the past 10 years by
-the opening of GPS (Global Positioning System) data to the world by the US military (an excellent example of treating “information as infrastructure”, in which the US government bears the cost of supplying, in effect, location data to non-US-taxpaying people in the UK and elsewhere); and
-the ability to create “crowdsourced” maps, such as OpenStreetMap (OSM), which are accessible via the internet without copyright restriction for consultation, addition or editing.

In the future the GI market will be further transformed by
-the growing number of smartphones with built-in GPS
-the falling cost of mapping large areas with great precision due to improving satellite photography systems
-mapping information, including road and route data, becoming a commodity, where only value-added forms can be effectively charged for.

Sales of satnav devices provide a clear indication that “knowing where you are” is a key piece of information for people: estimates suggest that between 4 million and 7.5m such devices have been sold in the past 10 years in the UK alone.

The commoditisation of route and road information, which has previously been supplied only by Ordnance Survey, will continue. If satnav makers decided that the OSM mapping was good enough, and that the pricing model it offers (of zero cost), they might choose to use its database (or even to improve its database while using it) and neglect the OS version. Under the present OS funding model, the only way for OS to recover its costs would be to raise costs to its existing clients, including the public sector – which would not fit PD2.

Therefore it is essential that OS does provide the OS Free data to encourage the growth of the UK geographical information sector, and develops its own high-quality mapping as part of the public task for which it exists.

Question 3: What are your views on the appropriate pricing model for Ordnance Survey products and services?
Given the name of the campaign, our obvious answer would be “all should be free”. But we recognise that there are pragmatic and political problems with this.

The question assumes a great deal about OS products and services, and its charging regimen. However as noted in the consultation OS has consistently declined to separate out the costs and revenues and profits of its “raw” and “value-added” products and services, which makes it difficult to take anything but a Gordian Knot approach to finding appropriate models.

The question would be better framed as “which products and services should OS produce, and what should it charge for, and how should the charging regime be set?”

The more logical approach is to ask what OS’s public task should be, what products and services flow from that, how far those should be self-financing (using, say, a trading fund method) and what other products and services are seen as a public good which should be funded out of general taxation.

OS’s public task is clearly to map the geography of the UK; arguably this also includes the built environment. MasterMap provides an appropriate starting point for the public task, comprising a detailed scale of the UK.

For the moment we find the proposed model – with MasterMap and non-OS Free products’ prices aligned for the public and private sectors – to be equable. However as costs of updating maps and built environment detail falls (due to pervasive GPS feedback systems such as smartphones and cheaper satellite imagery allied to automated updating of map databases) this may need review to see whether more detailed scale products closer to MasterMap level can also be offered free.

Question 4: What are your views and comments on public sector information regulation and policy, and the concepts of public task and good governance as they apply to Ordnance Survey?
PSI regulation and policy suffers from the problem that where public organisations decline to comply with it, neither method of enforcement is satisfactory.
-If OPSI or other organisations demand compliance using non-legal recourse (e.g. asking for “good practice”), the non-complying organisation can ignore it; or
-if OPSI or other organisations seek legal recourse for compliance, the exercise is extremely costly for all concerned and is concluded so slowly due to legal process that private organisations in particular are at risk of going out of business first. (The instance of Getmapping’s complaint against OS in the early 2000s is illustrative.)

It is absurd that OS has written its own definition of its public task – with or without the consent of its minister in DCLG. With the release of OS Free, it is time for the job of defining OS’s public task, which impinges on huge parts of British life and the economy, to be put in the hands of a body entirely outside OS.

Question 5: What are your views on and comments on the products under consideration for release for free re-use and the rationale for their inclusion?
It is essential that there should be both raster graphics and vector graphics. The former allow easy use on websites to create Google Maps-style interfaces (where the map can be “dragged” to a location). The latter allow dynamic scaling. Though no rationale has been offered for their inclusion, they seem to fit the “mid-scale” requirement.

The inclusion of Code-Point and Boundary-Line datasets, with licences that allow free reuse (including commercial reuse) is essential to the creation of useful, effective and profit-generation applications.

Question 6: How much do you think government should commit to funding the free product set? How might this be achieved?
This is a key question – and how the government chooses to implement this will demonstrate whether it is truly committed to the idea that “information is infrastructure” by creating a model of funding that will be applicable to other data-collecting trading funds and parts of citizen-funded government, or if it is simply choosing a short-term fix for the problem of the desperate need for free access to OS data.

It is easiest to start by indicating what the government should not do.

– It should not raise prices within government for the non-free OS datasets above those charged to commercial organisations outside government. This would create tensions under which government organisations would naturally seek third-party solutions to reduce their costs (because of PD2). That would undermine income for OS and jeopardise the quality of all its data. In extreme cases, price rises might deter local authorities and other public bodies from using high quality geographic information to deploy their resources more efficiently and end up costing the public purse more in the long term.

– It should not raise prices for commercial organisations above those charged to government for the same datasets. This too will tend to exacerbate any drift to third-party solutions for high-value datasets. (Although it should be expected that these will occur naturally due to new entrants in the market.)

Therefore government should commit exactly the “funding gap” that making the datasets mentioned free will cause – apart from the paper maps. OS will presumably continue to sell paper maps, and will be able to rely on its brand to benefit from their sales and consequent profits. Therefore Treasury should fund the “gap” in revenues out of general tax funding, rather than by levying greater charges for OS data from other public sector sources.

The government’s own argument that “information is infrastructure” should be applied here. Roads, for example, are physical infrastructure. Government sees their provision as a public good and commits to fund their building from general taxation. It does not charge higher road tax prices to government-owned vehicles to offset the fact that government has built the roads and provides free access to them. (Nor is road tax hypothecated towards road-building.)

In the same way, other public sector organisations that use OS data should not be charged over the amount that private sector groups would be, and their payments should not be hypothecated towards any “funding gap”. The amounts being discussed – ¬£19-¬£24m pa – are comparatively small when set against overall public spending.

The benefits, admittedly, are difficult to enumerate. It is possible that, as with GPS, the benefits will not be immediately visible, and may not appear in the same place as the investment. It would therefore be sensible for government to commission regular studies to evaluate the growth of business predicated on use of the OS Free products.

By adopting a “non-hypothecation” approach to funding OS Free, government will be greatly simplifying the process required for the subsequent release of other datasets from other government-owned bodies. The pressure to release OS Free arose because the trading fund model is too restrictive: it cannot prime the market.

To draw an analogy, the search engine Google could not be profitable if it were to use Microsoft’s Windows to power its multiple thousands of servers that store its index of the internet. It would have to pay a Windows licence on each of those servers, and for each additional one. The cost would outweigh its profits. Instead, Google uses the free Linux operating system for those servers. We are suggesting that using the OS trading fund model for products is akin to licensing Windows: it limits the size of the market for their use, and the speed with which companies can grow while using those products.

Question 7: What are your views on how free data from Ordnance Survey should be delivered?
The key to the datasets being useful will be (a) availability (b) reliability ( c) accessibility.
Availability: where are the datasets stored? If OS hosts the files, it will need to create an entirely new system to support hundreds or thousands of concurrent accesses. That is inefficient, and outside OS’s remit. It would be more sensible for the datasets to be uploaded to a cloud facility such as Amazon’s S3 storage or Google’s cloud facility where copies could be downloaded. This is a comparatively low-cost solution where OS would only have to pay for downloads, rather than setting up its own hosting service.

Furthermore, it is clear that the datasets will be subject to change over time. It would be inefficient to upload a complete set every day, for example. A more effective method would be to upload a “diff” file of differences from the previous full upload every so often (daily, weekly, monthly). This would reduce the total amount that would be needed to for an up-to-date download and simultaneously create new opportunities for applications showing what has changed on a map or dataset over time. A full dataset incorporating the diffs from the last full upload could be provided every, say, six months.

Reliability: so users can be confident that the files come from OS, they should be cryptographically signed.

Accessibility: the files should be made available in formats that are readable using open-source software: that will ensure that they will be usable by the widest possible range of users and applications.

Question 8: What are your views on the impact Ordnance Survey Free will have on the market?
Resellers of OS data will not be pleased. But this will force them to focus on value-added services rather than promulgating a system which perpetuates the extension of copyright limitations that are not sustainable in the age of the internet.

Some map providers have already cut their prices in response to the expectation of OS Free. As in Canada (in the example cited in the consultation) we should expect that mapmakers will take the opportunity to create specialised maps for different niche groups (climbers, walkers, and other outdoors pursuits are likely to be the first to take advantage of this).

The provision of CodePoint will galvanise a market that has been held back by the problems of creating fast, cheap and legal lookups for geocodes. Although organisations such as Yahoo offer them, using those leaves providers dependent on outside groups, when they would prefer to do their own lookup. CodePoint is an essential part of the package.

The provision of Boundary-Line will be highly important in the forthcoming election. It will also be important for online organisations which depend on mapping electoral constituencies.

Question 9: What are your comments on the proposal for a single National Address Register and suggestions for mechanisms to deliver it?
The absence of a working National Address Register (due mainly to intellectual property claims by publicly owned bodies) has created the absurd situation of the Office for National Statistics being forced to spend millions of pounds creating a one-off register for use in the 2011 census and then discarding it afterwards.

Government should retain the ONS census for future reuse and treat it as a resource with huge ability to create value for the economy.

Question 10: What are your views on the options outlined in this consultation?
Option 1 – allowing OS to continue with its planned “hybrid” strategy – is deeply unsatisfying. The strategy proposal has received no proper oversight; it has not been debated in Parliament; its financial assumptions are at best weak and at worst flawed; and the creation of an “attached” private company that would sell OS-branded goods is anticompetitive because it offers no transparency on pricing, while having sole advantage of the OS brand.

Option 2 – releasing large-scale data for free reuse – would cross a Rubicon. Although the Free Our Data campaign would support this, we are concerned that government and Treasury has not shown sufficient commitment to the idea of vote-funded data collection and parsing by OS, and that this strategy could endanger the long-term future of OS. Furthermore, it could undermine would-be commercial competitors, and would create substantial upheaval in the geographic information market. Change is good, but too much change can be unpalatable.

Option 3 – releasing “mid-scale” data as suggested, and considering a transition to further release – seems to offer a path towards the long-term future of OS while providing the opportunity to prove the benefit that would accrue to the private sector, and thus the Treasury through tax receipts, of freeing data. We find this the most pragmatic approach – but reiterate that the government’s aim should be to pursue a path where it releases data for the use of citizens without cost impairment.

Question 11: For local authorities: What will be the balance of impact of these proposals on your costs and revenues?
N/A.

Question 12: Will these proposals have any impact on race, gender or disability equalities?
We see no impact on those inequalities.

The official launch yesterday of data.gov.uk, with an index of 2,500 datasets provided by government departments, is fantastic news – and a significant milestone for the Free Our Data campaign.

It’s worth remembering how far we’ve come since 9 March 2006, when we kicked off the campaign in Guardian Technology with Give us back our crown jewels:

Imagine you had bought this newspaper for a friend. Imagine you asked them to tell you what’s in the TV listings – and they demanded cash before they would tell you. Outrageous? Certainly. Yet that is what a number of government agencies are doing with the data that we, as taxpayers, pay to have collected on our behalf. You have to pay to get a useful version of that data. Think of Ordnance Survey’s (OS) mapping data: useful to any business that wanted to provide a service in the UK, yet out of reach of startup companies without deep pockets.

This situation prevails across a number of government agencies. Its effects are all bad. It stifles innovation, enterprise and the creativity that should be the lifeblood of new business. And that is why Guardian Technology today launches a campaign – Free Our Data. The aim is simple: to persuade the government to abandon copyright on essential national data, making it freely available to anyone, while keeping the crucial task of collecting that data in the hands of taxpayer-funded agencies.

And further on:

[The consultancy] Pira [carrying out a study for the EU] pointed out that the US’s approach brings enormous economic benefits. The US and EU are comparable in size and population; but while the EU spent €9.5bn (£6.51bn) on gathering public sector data, and collected €68bn selling and licensing it, the US spent €19bn – twice as much – and realised €750bn – over 10 times more. [Peter] Weiss [who wrote a study comparing the US and UK] pointed out: “Governments realise two kinds of financial gain when they drop charges: higher indirect tax revenue from higher sales of the products that incorporate the … information; and higher income tax revenue and lower social welfare payments from net gains in employment.”

So is that it? Is the campaign over? No, not at all. There are plenty of holdouts: UK Hydrographic Office is complicated (because it buys in third-party data which it then resells), yet even so one would think there should be information that it collects about British coastal waters which could be released as having public benefit.

Similarly postcodes, where there is some notable opposition to making any of the datasets free. The easiest one would be PostZon, which simply holds geolocations for each postcode plus data about which health and administrative boundary it lies inside; that’s nothing like as extensive (or valuable) as the full Postcode Address File (PAF).

But there’s really strong resistance against making anything from the Royal Mail available for free, and one detects Lord Mandelson’s hand in this.

If you haven’t yet had your say on the OS consultation, Harry Metcalfe has created a terrific tool for doing precisely that at osconsult.ernestmarples.com. Go along and make your views heard.

A few things that strike us as we read through the consultation and impact assessment (links in previous posts).

Impact assessment:

Ordnance Survey generates most of its revenue from business and the public sector; in 2008/9 they each accounted for 46 per cent of the organisation’s total revenue. Consumers, through the sale of paper maps in retailing channels, accounted for the remaining 8 per cent of sales.

Impact assessment:

Ordnance Survey generates revenues from its products through licensing arrangements either directly with customers, or indirectly through licensed partners and through retail distributors. The direct customer channel accounts for two-thirds of Ordnance Survey’s trading revenue and includes various collective purchase agreements and major private sector users such as the utility companies. Approximately 25 per cent of Ordnance Survey’s trading revenue is generated though the indirect partner channel.

Impact assessment:

Separately, there are imbalances in Ordnance Survey’s current pricing model which may be causing inefficient allocation of resources. Firstly, Ordnance Survey currently charges private sector customers of its large-scale products significantly more than comparable government customers. The higher prices being paid by the private sector may potentially have restricted consumption to the less price sensitive users, impacting the economic benefit to the economy. Secondly, the payment allocation mechanism employed by government generates a weak price signal to Ordnance Survey from individual government users within the collective agreements.

[OS] already has a cost reduction programme underway as part of its existing business strategy, but any long-term strategic option would seek to introduce a framework that enhances cost transparency and provides incentives to pursue further efficiency gains.

What interesting reading the impact assessment of the DCLG consultation on making OS data free is. Clearly some arms have been twisted in the Treasury to make it happen – Liam Byrne, chief secretary to the Treasury, almost surely in the driving seat there.

On the option being chosen (which is explicitly not the one that was examined in the “Cambridge study”, which looked at the benefits of releasing large-scale data, not the “mid-scale” data being proposed) the cost seems to be that government costs rise somewhat, while costs to the commercial sector fall.

Lost OS revenue from OS Free data being made free: £19-24m (govt would fund this on a cost plus basis, amounting to £6-9m).

Increased government charges for large-scale data: £28-34m (price rebalancing based on number of datasets used by public and private sector).

One-off (Transition) Yrs: £ tbc

Average Annual Cost (excluding one-off): £47-58m

Total Cost (PV) £391-482m

Other key non-monetised costs by ‘main affected groups’ Transition costs to Ordnance Survey, government departments and businesses of moving to new model. There would be impacts on third party providers (see Competition Assessment, Annex 1).

ANNUAL BENEFITS

Description and scale of key monetised benefits by ‘main affected groups’: gain to business and consumers from OS large-scale data being made cheaper: £28-34m if assume price rebalancing is revenue neutral.

Gain from OS Free data being made available: £19-24m.

Average Annual Benefit (excluding one-off) £47-58m

Total Benefit (PV) £391-482m

Other key non-monetised benefits by ‘main affected groups’: The lower charges to businesses and consumers for large-scale data, and the free data should increase demand and hence welfare. Entry and innovation should occur in the market for geographical information. These welfare benefits have not been quantified (Pollock report focuses on releasing large-scale data).

And finally:

Key Assumptions/Sensitivities/Risk: Modelling assumptions: some substitution from paid-for to free data; lost revenue by OS due to competition from new derived products. Not yet determined how the revenue shortfall will be covered from government (i.e. who will pay and how). So for now assume no change in demand, but will estimate this for the final IA.

Let’s just remind ourselves what it was that Sir Rob Margetts, chair of Ordnance Survey, said at the launch of OS’s proposed new strategy (which is now in little pieces all over the floor since Gordon Brown and Tim Berners-Lee announced the end of derived data and the freeing up of mid-scale mapping, but anyway) back in April:

“We came to conclusion that the cost to government in the first five years [of a free data model] would be between £500m and £1 billion. That wasn’t the only reason that we discarded it. We did, with outside help, a review of equivalent organisations around the world.“

With regard to the International Comparison of Geographical Information Trading Models Study, outside help was provided by senior officials of those Institutions contacted.

In the case of the United States of America, as senior officials of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) were unavailable, Mr. David Cowen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of South Carolina, kindly provided us with an in-depth overview of the state of public sector GI data in the United States, including USGS. Mr Cowan is a former chair of the Mapping Science Committee of the United States National Research Council and is chair of the National Research Council’s Committee for the study of Land Parcel Databases.

The document was also reviewed by an internationally recognised expert in Geographical Information and National Mapping who agreed with the analysis and conclusions.

copies of all emails and/or documents internally relating to the decision to choose this person – for example, discussion of who would be suitable candidates or who would not be suitable candidates to carry out the review of the report

OS replies:

There was no decision process in place to find suitable candidates. An opportunity presented itself to request the opinion of a global expert in this field which was undertaken orally. The resultant opinion was expressed orally and there was no permanent record made of these conversations.

So here’s what happens. You have a report. You happen to bump into an old mate. “Hey, want to read my report?” you say. “Sure,” they say. They read it. “Seems OK,” they say. You go back to your office and tell people “I met X who says it’s fine.” Even though the report is a thrown-together farrago of disconnected information about various national mapping agencies and their charging methods, combined with an unrelated chunk of poorly displayed data about national GDP versus national R&D expenditure, which cannot by any reasonable measure be claimed to justify anything about any charging model.

This then becomes “The document was also reviewed by an internationally recognised expert in Geographical Information and National Mapping who agreed with the analysis and conclusions.”

If there is anyone at Ordnance Survey who is prepared to defend this course of events, could they please get in touch? Or even the international expert, who is very welcome to comment anonymously to explain whether they think OS’s representation of their opinion is justified. Comments are open.

In the Guardian on Thursday, we have the cost-benefit analysis – if somewhat cursory – of having Royal Mail charge for its PostZon database (as used by ernestmarples, though indirectly) and having it available for free. So, for example, did RM lose out through ernestmarples? Or did we taxpayers benefit?

Royal Mail claimed that Richard Pope and Harry Metcalfe, the duo behind the site, had caused it “loss”. As the PostZon database being accessed via ernestmarples.com – named after the man who introduced postcodes to the UK – costs about £4,000 a year to license, could it be right?

Some simple calculations show that in fact everyone else, including the government that owns Royal Mail, and perhaps even Royal Mail itself, would benefit from the data being free.

Pope and Metcalfe point out that ernestmarples.com, which queried other websites that provide PostZon data for its postcode-location conversions, fed a number of their other websites – including Job Centre Pro Plus (which used a postcode lookup to find jobs near you), Planning Alerts (which alerts you to new planning applications in your area) and The Straight Choice (used to file election leaflets by area).

Job Centre Pro Plus had 437,354 searches for jobs since March this year, according to Metcalfe. If only 0.001% of those led to someone finding employment and saved £100 in benefit payments, then ernestmarples.com has, overall, saved the government money.

And Pope points out that professional property developers used PlanningAlerts “since it allows them to look for opportunities/competition”.

If that led them to work worth more than £20,000, the 25% corporate tax rate means the government has received more in tax revenue than it has lost from Pope and Metcalfe’s non-licensing of PostZon. Pope also notes that “few councils were using the PlanningAlerts API [programming interface] since it was easier and cheaper than paying external consultants to hack they achingly bad internal systems.” He points to Lincoln City Council, where PlanningAlerts was used to generate the RSS feed and map for planning. Would it cost more than £4,000 for Lincoln to build a system to do the job PlanningAlerts enabled?

Furthermore, “I was told by someone at the Electoral Commission that they used the Straight Choice during the Euro elections to monitor parties,” Pope said. “The alternative would be paying for hundreds of field agents (which they can’t afford).”

Rufus Pollock, a Cambridge economist who co-wrote a study for the government on the economic benefit of making trading funds’ data free, calculates that making PostZon free would bring an economic benefit 50% greater than Royal Mail’s present revenues.

Subequently it’s been suggested to me that the cost of licensing is more like £1,200 rather than £4,000 – which makes the case for benefit from free data even greater.

Well, well. Wikileaks, the organisation that has leaked details about Daniel Arap Moi’s finances and UBS’s dealings, has provided something altogether more interesting than the identity of the international man or woman of mystery.

It’s a confidential briefing document by Sir Rob Margetts, chair of Ordnance Survey, Vanessa Lawrence, chief exec of OS, and Charlie Villar (who Google tells us is a member of the Shareholder Executive) to “the minister” – hard to know who but since it talks about various options such as the OpenSpace concept, which was unveiled earlier this year, we assume the minister in question was Iain Wright – else this would hardly be confidential information, would it?

One very interesting page is p9, which seems to offer a comparison of the “current” trading fund model, the “utility” – is that “free data”? – model, and the “hybrid” model, though not much is made clear about what the hybrid model actually involves. Except that moving to it doesn’t involve any restructuring costs, which seems incredible.

Your opinions welcome: what does it mean? Can this report somehow be the source of Sir Rob’s mysterious “cost the government £500m to £1bn to shift to a free data model” claim? And does that claim – and this briefing – actually stand up to public scrutiny, rather than the minister’s private office?

SeaZone Solutions Limited (“SeaZone”) specialises in the market for Marine GIS data, software and services, and is the world leader in the provision of Marine datasets. The business supports numerous public and private sector organisations across a range of planning, regulatory, engineering and asset management activities. The business is primarily focused on the UK Marine GIS market, has turnover of c.£1.0m and employs approximately 20 people.

And why the sale?

Acting for the Secretary of State in his capacity as sole shareholder in Admiralty Holdings Limited (“AHL”), SeaZone’s parent, the UKHO invites applications from innovative organisations to develop opportunities in the Marine GIS market through the SeaZone business and brand. The UKHO is seeking a strategic partner which can provide commercial expertise, product development, market & sales channel capabilities and investment to capitalise on the market opportunities in the Marine GIS sector.

This will move through to a shortlist of proposals by September 21, with a plan to complete the transaction by October 2009.

Amidst all the talk of UKHO privatisation, it’s intriguing to see this happening. Why sell SeaZone? What can’t UKHO do with it?

It is expected that increased development activity in the energy sector and marine legislation will continue to drive the market for Marine GIS and provide the business with significant future opportunities in the UK and overseas.

Possibly it’s that “overseas” angle that UKHO doesn’t quite want to grapple with. Is this a sign of UKHO focussing more tightly on things, or is it just piecemeal privatisation? Your comments and guidance on how this fits into the wider matrix of things – and especially into the free data debate – are really welcome here.

Following yesterday’s – yesterday’s! – questions to the Ordnance Survey about the identity of the international expert, we’ve had a response.

Here it is (emphasis added):

Thank you for your email dated 30 July 2009 requesting: the following information regarding the internationally recognised expert in Geographical Information and National Mapping, which I believe does not identify them personally.

We are pleased to provide you with the following information with regard to your request.

1) Does the “internationally recognised expert” work in a full-time or continuous part-time capacity for Ordnance Survey? – No.

2) If the answer to (1) is no, was the person formally commissioned on a contract basis by OS to review its study? – No.

3) If the answer to (1) and (2) is no, on what remunerative basis did the person review the study? – None.

So the international expert isn’t employed on any basis by OS, and reviewed the study for free.

Now I’m really fascinated. Who is this person? Why would they review this study for nothing? (Remember, we’ve ruled out Steven Feldman, Max Craglia and Robin McLaren.

Remember the definition: an “internationally recognised expert in Geographical Information and National Mapping”. More candidates, please. Or suggestions on how we can narrow their identity down further – while noting that they don’t want to be identified.